


five ways to cheat the devil [and your lover]

by Yunaan



Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 5
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Childhood Friends, Enemies to Lovers, Enemy Lovers, F/M, Lovers who go back n forth I guess, Melodrama, Mutual Pining, They've met, descriptions of violence, maybe future smut idk, will update as i proceed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:33:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25833565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yunaan/pseuds/Yunaan
Summary: Odd old ends stolen forth from holy writ, and seem a saint when most I play the devil.
Relationships: Deputy | Judge/John Seed, Female Deputy | Judge/John Seed, John Seed/Original Character(s), John Seed/Original Female Character(s)
Kudos: 13





	five ways to cheat the devil [and your lover]

**Author's Note:**

> I literally publish a bad fic like, once a year. Anyways, I hope y’all enjoy yourselves. Flameo hotman.

She doesn’t know why she didn’t figure it out sooner. The realization crashes into her like a wave, with icy cold dread seeping into her bones.

John Seed. John Duncan. Just, John. That’s all he was to her, once.

He barely looks like her John. The John that vomited when they tried smoking cigarettes Rook swiped from her dad. The John that laughed with her, fought with her, and cried with her. 

His hair was always a mess, and he smiled so much more back then, when it still could reach his eyes. That John was broken and hurt and cut up on the inside, but he wanted to be good, kind, loving. She remembered his temper too, his being volatile and his occasional outbursts, when he threw her copy of The Two Towers at the wall when he told her the news.

But this, this was seriously fucked up. It was like he was put together all wrong. All the sharp edges stuck out, and all the softness was gone.The light that once caused his deep blue eyes to shine was replaced with the glassy glare of unadulterated mania. 

It had been 20 long years, and after it all, after she’d long given up hope on seeing him again. Her John was dead. And no body left to bury because this demonic thing was using his corpse. Nothing to mourn except long dead memories. The different emotions from seeing his face again are colliding together in a horrible cacophony of noise inside her skull and she thinks she's going to be sick.

She wants to say something, anything to him, but she couldn’t even think coherently, let alone speak. She wants John to push her down again under the water, and this time, keep her there.She wants to scream, cry, laugh, anything at all, but everything that she could have possibly said just dies in her throat.  
She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t fight the cult, she couldn’t save anyone. She couldn’t save him. 

John is about to push her under again, and she thinks Yes, before Joseph is materializing behind them like a sick vision. 

She watches through blurry vision as Joseph and John do some sort of half hug/forehead touch like it's a kind of communion, and the tension sinks out of John’s shoulders. She doesn’t understand a damn thing about them.

“You have to love them,” he says, and Rook nearly fucking chokes on tepid riverwater for the second time this evening and her vision goes red. Love them? Does he think he’s showing love as he snatched her friends right in front of her eyes? When he let his family strip Pratt and Hudson, and even the dickhead Marshall of their identities and torture them within a millimeter of their lives? God, she is going to kill Joseph. It’s all his fault, his stupid poisioning words and his hold on his brother, its all his fault.

She’d make a run for Joseph right then and there to make him pay back his sins with blood and bone but the stupid fucking Bliss is making her bones feel like rubber. Rook could swear she was already going down after John lets her go when the butt of a Peggie’s rifle hits her in the temple. 

John, John, John. 

Coming to in the back of a Peggie van is simultaneously horrible and a massive fucking relief. She wants to be far, far, away from John Seed, and the devil that wears his face. On the other hand, this van is heading up into the mountains, presumably to The Baptist's bunker. Which is much, much worse than spending an evening in the Henbane River together. Thankfully, she doesn't have to worry about the rumors about the bowels of John’s bunker where blood runs like water for too long when there's a loud bang from outside. The van careens off the road, flipping once and landing on its back like a big metal beetle, its occupants now splayed across the interior’s roof.

Rook thinks her head is actually going to crack open like an egg when Pastor Jerome half drags her useless self out of the demolished can and pushes a pistol into her hands. 

And with Jerome giving her directions she can barely understand with her ears ringing and her head still swimming in the Henbane, she’s back in the fray. Complete with a definite concussion and still half high off Bliss. 

She prays she doesn’t die from this nonsense before she can wrap her hands around Joseph’s neck and drag him straight to Hell with her.

~ 

Rook was crying in her backyard the day she first met John. 

She was trying to jump off the swings again, the way the cool and tough kids did on the playground at school. She swung until she got as high as she could possibly go, and jumped.

It was lucky she didn’t break a leg or twist an ankle but rather haphazardly landed on her feet before not sticking the landing and falling to ground, landing on her hands and knees. 

The pebbles dig into her palms and knees and Rook lets out a yelp at the sharp sting of torn skin. She scrambles to a sitting position and examines her hands before she starts to sniffle. 

“Uhm. Are you okay?” Rook hears a voice say, and she turns to see a boy, around her age, poking the top of his head over the fence. His brown hair sticks up in the front in a funny looking cowlick and his blue eyes were wide as he took in her bleeding palms. 

Rook sniffled again before wiping her nose with the sleeve of her windbreaker.

“M’okay. Just stings.” She says bravely, trying to look impressive to this newcomer.

“You don’t look okay. You were crying.” He says petulantly.

“Was not.” 

“Were too! You’re a liar, and a crybaby.” 

“Well, you’re mean. Go away.” Rook stands up and brushes the dirt from her jeans and sticks her tongue out at this rude stranger. She stomps up the steps to her backdoor and disappears inside with a huff and a slam of the screen door.

The boy watches her go, and frowns before ducking back down on his side of the wooden fence.

~

Rook doesn’t know how she makes it through the ravine. The Peggie manning the mortar rained so many shells down on the Resistance members scrambling to get through the canyon that Rook is surprised the very earth didn’t collapse under their feet.

She swings a metal bat at one of the cultists guarding Merle and she fights not to gag at the sound of crunching bone. The other cultists are taken out with a few blasts from Jerome’s gifted pistol. She grabs Merle and hauls him onto his feet before she mans the mortar herself. 

Merle fuckin’ Briggs. Any resistance member is going to be useful right about now, but Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, she wished the Peggies took the annoying prick away way sooner. While they were getting his ugly ass truck back a week ago, he made a couple passing comments about two resistance members making jokes to each other in rapid fire Spanish. Shit along the lines of, “I’d rather all these immigrants speak English in America,” and “wish they built the goddamn wall.” 

“I’d rather you shut your colonizer ass up before I say you and your truck can go and fuck off," she says and puts her muddy boots up on the dashboard as if to say, I wish a bitch would try it. She’s sure to leave a sizable dent in the back of that purple and green monstrosity once its back in Merle’s hands. 

Regardless of how fucking annoying he is, he covers her ass somewhat as she starts blasting cultists off the mountainside.

She hopes to God that the chopper gets here before she finally collapses. Or that Merle will at least drag her prone body with them. Anything to get off John’s fucking mountain. 

It feels like an eternity before the helicopter touches down and she and Merle make a break for it. She feels the not unfamiliar burning sensation of a bullet grazing her shoulder before she tosses herself into the chopper. 

The second they’re no longer in the range of the Peggies’ guns, she finally passes out, the exhaustion all too much.

She comes into one of the two rooms above The Spread Eagle. Adelaide’s sitting in a chair by her bedside, reading a magazine when Rook stirs.

“Hey there sweet cheeks,” she says in her lovable twang and tosses the magazine onto the bedside table, immediately scooting a wastebasket closer towards Rook’s bed.

She snatches it immediately and heaves into it, her head swimming and unable to process anything other than the need to vomit. 

When she’s done, she sits back and Adelaide silently hands her a glass of water which Rook immediately chugs down. 

“What’s up?” She jokes weakly, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “You on babysitting duty?”

“You know it sugar. You got a surefire concussion, so we’ve got a rotation watching over ya for 48 hours just to be safe. We called up Doc Lindsay and he said you’ll be just fine if you clear the first 24 hours.”

“How long was I asleep?”

“About 20 hours, so we should be clear in 4. We don’t know when you got concussed so we’re counting down from when Mary May and the Pastor collected you. But don't think of going anywhere for the next day, you hear me young lady? It’s two days of bedrest, total.” Adelaided gives Rook one of her exceedingly rare motherly looks.

“Yes ma’am,” Rook says dutifully, and settles back down into bed. It’s damn comfy, with a pretty quilt that looks homemade. She wonders who made it.

There’s footsteps on the stairs and Mary May appears in the doorway holding a plate.

“Hey there, Deputy. Got any appetite in ya?”

Rook’s stomach decides to growl at that very moment, thus answering the question. Mary May lets out a laugh while Adelaide chuckles.

“Nothing too fancy, didn’t want to upset your stomach.” Mary May sets the plated on the bedside table, dutifully ignoring the bucket on the floor, which she's lowkey thankful for. Working in a bar, Rook can imagine she’s used to vomit.

“I gotta get back downstairs, but holler if you two need anything.” She tousles Rook’s hair and gives her a smile. “I’m glad we got you back in one piece.”

Rook grimaces at the action, feeling like somebody’s kid sister, but rather than complain, eats her food. Adelaide resumes her outdated tabloid. God, of all the fucking people, she sees John again. And smack dab in the closer inner circle of an insane cult led by his long lost brother with a savior complex. 

Would John care, if he knew who she was? She has no idea how far into the realm of insanity he is, and if he even remembers her. THe childish part of her, that remembers her John, cries out that he would always, always, remember her, and she can still save him so just try damn it!

She clamps the voices of her past down and tries to not think about how his hands felt on her neck not even 24 hours ago. The Holland Valley must be free. John and his followers are sucking the marrow out of the land and the people who live there, and hoarding it all up for the supposed Collapse. Rook also knows that John is the de facto legal face and bank of Eden’s Gate, even if Joseph is the beloved prophet. With John out of the way, Eden’s Gate has no legal protection, and can’t buy out land, or people, even. It would cripple the entire operation, a car with no gas and no license plate. However, the thought of laying a hand on John, and seeing the fear grow in his blue eyes is so physically repugnant that Rook’s stomach rolls and a sharp pain lances through her chest. She would never be able to kill him without faltering. It would never work. He’s a maniac, a murderer, and she knows that he’s putting Hudson through hell, wherever the hell he’s keeping her. But Rook can’t think about him without remembering an eight year old with a cowlick and an infectious smile. 

She knows she won’t be able to kill him, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t have to die. If she just locked him up, Joseph and Jacob would move heaven and earth to get him back, and the Resistance wasn’t strong enough to handle open combat instead of their usual guerilla tactics. Someone else will have to do it, and serve as her executioner. Rook grits her teeth and puts her plate back down, all appetite gone. 

“You alright sweetcheeks?” Adelaide says from over the top of her magazine.

“Yeah. Just not so hungry.”

The older woman hums and lifts an eyebrow but doesn’t push the subject. Should she tell someone? Her friends may not trust her if she does. But what if they somehow find out on their own? That would be a million times worse.

There’s a stupid voice in her head that says she should just tell John who she is, and rip the fucking band aid off. Rook has no goddamn idea how John would react. Maybe he’d be crazy enough to just kill her on the spot and then Rook wouldn’t have to stress out over this shit anymore because she’d be facedown in a ditch.

She settles back in bed, feeling a headache coming on, and shuts her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope y'all wearing masks in public n washing your grubby hands still. Thank you for reading and have a lovely fantastic day. <3


End file.
